What’s Involved in Address Cleanup?

We have 2 basic levels of address cleanup:

• One is a combination of automated and manual reviews that are part of our custom enhancements to the address standardization process listed below.
   
• The other is a more advanced search to find problems in the data. This is a more in depth process.
  
  For example, depending on the list, we look for things like temporary addresses (hotel rooms, for example), inappropriate comments (like "Bad Dept") or shipping instructions (like "deliver to back door”).
  
  Each file is a bit different and usually presents it's own unique challenges. The exact process is custom, and varies based on your needs and what is found when we look at the data.

Address Standardization

One of the first steps when working name and address data is to standardize the address as much as possible. The addresses are compared to the postal databases to ensure they match an actual address.

In addition, we ensure the elements of the address, like Ave, SW, Suite, etc. are all changed to their standardized abbreviations.

Once this is done, other actions like duplicate elimination become much more effective since the standardization results in identical addresses being created for the same location. Addresses that cannot be matched or standardized can be manually reviewed.

CASS Certification

CASS is a postal service acronym for "Coding Accuracy Support System", which frankly does a poor job of describing what it is.

Simply put, it is a certified process for matching an address to the postal databases, verifying or correcting the ZIP code, and returning the additional information such as the ZIP+4 code that are required for mailings. The software that performs this work produces a document called a "CASS Certificate" that is required for barcoded mailings.

What's Involved with Data Conversion?

Data Conversion is the process of moving data from one format to another. A common example would be from Excel into something like Microsoft SQL Server or vice versa. Some conversions are straightforward and rather simple to do. Others, such as transferring data that is in a form or publication (like a directory) into a database, can pose major challenges. Almost everything we do requires some data conversion. Whatever your data conversion needs, chances are we can do it.